An Epiphany at the Versace Mansion

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

     —Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”

Six years ago, on a work trip to Miami, Joe and I had a horrendous dinner at the over-the-top, storied former home of slain fashion designer Gianni Versace. This brush with the excesses of the ’90s helped remind me of my lost decade and what happens to mere mortals who fly too close to the sun.

 

A brazen money grab now known as The Villa Casa Casuarina, the boutique hotel’s owners once naively sought to establish a fresh identity for the tainted site. They have since given up all that and brazenly market the ornate architectural oddity, so incongruous with its Art Deco environs, as “the former Versace mansion.” 

During his lifetime, Gianni Versace poured millions into a garish, self-indulgent vision that was the ground zero of his opulent, gold-inflected brand. Italy’s answer to Citizen Kane, one can only surmise the insecurities that drove Versace’s opulent lifestyle.

It was morbid curiosity that led us to gawk at this place. Seeing Versace’s Floridian palace, the locus of one of America’s most notorious crimes, is the only reason anyone would go to this baroque tourist trap hiding in plain sight on busy Ocean Drive. 

 

Many online reviews warn prospective diners about the appalling food at the unimaginatively named Gianni’s restaurant. Some foolish souls are even willing to shell out thousands to stay here and sleep in the same rooms that Versace, sister Donatella, and his lovers and guests once did.

Inside this selfie trap, the mosaic tile Medusa head on the floor of the Italianate swimming pool and a few other random Medusa heads are the only remaining branding pointing to its former inhabitant and his overreaching tastes. 

According to public lore and one entertaining and exploitative TV miniseries, the famed fashion designer held many trysts here and had no scruples about how he picked up partners outside of his primary relationship. 

It is physically impossible to set foot in Casa Casuarina without recognizing the brutal and tragic 1997 murder that took place on the front steps. On this same, narrow threshold that one must traverse to enter the hotel, Versace was gunned down execution-style by a drug-crazed spree killer after taking his habitual morning stroll to retrieve the day’s newspapers. 

His hedonism notwithstanding, Versace’s demise was a terrifying coda to a blazing, era-defining talent extinguished in his prime. 

 

In 1997, this murder stunned me out of complacency, occurring at a time of weighty questioning in my own life -- of reckoning with my pleasure-seeking lifestyle and grudgingly seeing the errors of my ways. I knew in my heart that my time in New York had run its course and that a more measured life beckoned. 

Princess Diana’s fatal car crash would occur six weeks after Versace’s murder. These two senseless, sudden deaths seemed to telegraph the menace of our culture’s insane worship of celebrity and its trappings. 

My move back to Cleveland that fall may have felt like a return to the humdrum, like Nick Carraway’s return to Minnesota in The Great Gatsby. But ultimately, the Midwest’s insistent normalcy and grounding values saved me.

Sometimes a place cannot live down its past. Offering nothing life-affirming, the grim Versace mansion is now an enduring monument to tragedy, unwellness, and the price of grandiosity. It is the detritus of the damned and of people and a culture that permanently lost their way. 

All photos mine except top, credit: IShootPhotos LLC

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